It seemed like such a good strategy: Take the telco industry -- known for rock-solid voice services -- and extend it into the public cloud market. The effort would give customers reliability, security and peace of mind as telcos built clouds that global 2000 customers could truly trust.With that thought process in mind, CenturyLink acquired Savvis for $2.5 billion and Verizon acquired Terremark for $1.4 billion. Both deals surfaced in 2011 -- fully five years ago. At the time, Amazon Web Services' revenues were unknown to outsiders. Microsoft was still trying to gain traction with Office 365 and Azure, and IBM was still two years away from buying SoftLayer for $2 billion in 2013.Fast forward to the present. The five-year journey didn't go exactly as planned, and some telcos are changing course and even abandoning some cloud services. Indeed, Verizon is considering selling its cloud data centers and co-location businesses for at least $2.5 billion in an auction process, and the company is now shutting down some public cloud services. Meanwhile, CenturyLink is trying to sell its physical data centers -- though the company says it plans to continue offering the managed and cloud services within those data centers.Nobody is suggesting that CenturyLink, Verizon and other telcos have "imploded" in the cloud market. But their public cloud efforts haven't exactly lit the world on fire. Especially compared to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud/SoftLayer, each of which continue to describe revenue milestones and public cloud market share milestones on a quarterly basis.Virtualization gave way to docker and containers. Storage gave way to software-defined storage. SQL extended to NoSQL, Hadoop and big data. Apple iOS and Android support gave way to sensors and the Internet of Things. Who can possibly keep up with all of these waves? In many cases, the answer doesn't involve conservative telcos. Instead, B2B and B2C startups are the ones that push public cloud providers forward. Whether it's DevTest, DevOps or live production, the startups keep launching tomorrow's services on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud/SoftLayer.Those public cloud providers, in turn, must constantly turn on and test the next disruptive service or the next open source code that looks promising -- even if it blows up a few servers along the way. In addition to their continued risk taking, the big public cloud providers have grown up quite a bit -- achieving compliance with various security, privacy and data protection regulations that give healthcare, government and financial CIOs peace of mind.
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